Saturday, July 21, 2012

I would like to announce the release of Qubes RC1. The
installation ISO and instructions can be found here.

This release is expected to essentially
be identical to the final 1.0 release, which will likely
follow in the coming weeks, except for some minor, cosmetic fixes.

Comparing to the previous Beta 3 release, the major changes and improvements in this version include:

A much improved Qubes Manager, that
now allows to configure and manage almost every aspect of the Qubes
system using a simple and intuitive GUI.

All the VMs are now based on Fedora 17 template.

Cleaned up and improved command
lines tools for both Dom0
and for the VMs.

Updated Dom0 and VM kernels are now based
on 3.2.7-pvops kernel, which offer better hardware and power
management support.

Convenient menu improvements, that
include e.g. a handy icon for launching a Disposable Web browser in
a Disposable VM.

Support for “yum proxy”, which
smartly allows to update packages in a template VM (or other
updateable VM), without requiring to grant general HTTP access for
this VM. This has been a problem before, as the Fedora repos use
hundreds of mirrored yum servers, and it wasn't possible to setup a
single rule in the firewall VM to allow only access to the yum servers, and
nothing else. Now, this is possible, and the primary application is
to prevent user mistakes, e.g. against using the
temaplate VM for Web Browsing.